Associated motion in Tungusic languages: a case of mixed argument structure
Brigitte Pakendorf (DDL) & Natalia Stoynova (Vinogradov Institute of Russian, RAS, Moscow)
The languages of South America and Australia are known for their morphologically and semantically elaborate systems of Associated Motion (AM). In contrast, the five Tungusic languages discussed here, which belong to the Northern and the Southern branch of the family, have only a single suffix pertaining to this category. This morpheme expresses mainly andative meanings, although ventive readings are also possible, with the motion event preceding the verb event.
The cross-linguistically most striking feature of AM in the Tungusic languages is the fact that not only base verb arguments can be expressed, but so can motion arguments. We explore the argument structure of verbs marked with the AM-suffix in detail and find that both formal considerations (a preference for only one overt argument) and pragmatic considerations (the choice to foreground the motion argument over the verb argument) play a role in which argument(s) get expressed.

How do languages express meaning? Answering this question requires not only identifying the possible meaning(s) of every sentence and the semantic mechanisms that generate them, but also assessing which of these semantic mechanisms are shared cross-linguistically and which ones are not. In this talk, I propose to tackle these questions by adopting what I call a processing/learning approach: that is, I propose to investigate how these meanings and mechanisms are accessed, computed and learned by speakers.
In the first part of the talk, I will report the results of a study (joint work with Emmanuel Chemla and Benjamin Spector) where we used a priming paradigm to investigate the derivation of plural ambiguous sentences such as Amir and Manuel ate two cookies. This sentence can give rise to both distributive (i.e. two cookies each) and non-distributive (i.e. two cookies in total) interpretations. Non-distributive readings are traditionally thought to be derived by default, whereas distributive readings are thought to arise by applying some sort of distributive mechanism (Link, 1987; Champollion, 2017). Our results reveal that the distributive/non-distributive ambiguity gives rise to priming effects, suggesting that the abstract mechanism responsible for deriving plural ambiguities has a psychological correlate during comprehension.
In the second part of the talk, I will address the question of how languages partition the semantic space into lexical categories, with a specific focus on person systems, which categorize entities as a function of their role in the conversation (i.e., speaker(s), addressee(s), other(s)). Like other semantic category systems (e.g. color and kinship terms), not all ways of partitioning the person space are equally likely. I will present an artificial language learning study (joint work with Jennifer Culbertson) where we test whether the typological frequency of different person systems correlates with their learnability. We focus on the difference between 1st, 2nd and 3rd personal pronouns and test the predictions of two theories which propose different sets of features to capture the division of this space (Harley & Ritter 2002, Neeleman & Ackema 2018). Our findings provide the first experimental evidence for a feature-based theory of person systems that relies on an inherent asymmetry between the speaker and the addressee roles.

Atelier Histoire et Ecologie des Langues, Elisa Demuru: COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL PLAY IN BONOBOS AND CHIMPANZEES

14h00-15h30

MSH-Ennat Leger

Human communication is evolutionarily stratified, composed of layers of abilities of different antiquity. It is a system of systems. Within the debate on the origin on human language, growing attention is being devoted to the social cognitive capacities underpinning the “human interaction engine”, such as mimicry and imitation, empathy, theory of mind, cooperation, conversational turn-taking and shared intentionality. Although language in its full form sets Homo sapiens apart from our closest living relatives, one of the most promising means to shed light on its biological roots is the investigation of great apes’ natural communication and social cognition in search of those abilities that are shared between us and them and that might constitute the evolutionary layers or “building blocks” of the human interaction engine. The aim of this talk is to give an introduction on great apes’ communication, with a particular focus on gestural communication, and to show how the study of social play could contribute to the understanding of some debated aspects of primate communication and social cognition that are strictly related to the evolution of human language.

A new look into relativization in Martinican
Minella Duzerol (DDL)
Relativization, the syntactic process through which a subordinate clause expresses a property attributed to a noun, is not well documented for Martinican, a French-based Creole of the French West Indies island of Martinique. Following a typological perspective, this paper describes the two strategies identified in Martinican: the syntactic gap and the resumptive pronoun. Then, it argues that the morpheme la, occurring at the end of relative clauses that modify semantically definite nouns, is different from the definite determiner la. Lastly, the distribution in discourse of the available strategies is examined, looking at both typological and sociolinguistic parameters.

The two parts of this presentation discuss (1) a proposal that sound change results from joint innovation in production rather than innovation by an individual followed by spread through a community, as many researchers suppose (Stevens & Harrington, 2014); and (2) a demonstration of the ways that sound change structures consonant inventories, with a focus on basic, elaborated and complex consonants (Lindblom & Maddieson, 1988). The examination of basic consonants delivers some rather surprising results with implications for the evolution of phonological systems (with Shelece Easterday).
References
Lindblom, B., & Maddieson, I. (1988). Phonetic universals in consonant systems. In Language, speech and mind. Studies in honour of Victoria A. Fromkin ed. by Charles Li and Larry M. Hyman (pp. 62–78). London: Routledge.
Stevens, M., & Harrington, J. (2014). The individual and the actuation of sound change. Loquens1, 1(1), 1–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.3989/loquens.2014.003